Category: Poetry in the Public Domain

The fable which I now present,
Occurred to me by accident:
And whether bad or excellent,
Is merely so by accident.

A stupid ass this morning went
Into a field by accident:
And cropped his food, and was content,
Until he spied by accident
A flute, which some oblivious gent
Had left behind by accident;
When, sniffling it with eager scent,
He breathed on it by accident,
And made the hollow instrument
Emit a sound by accident.
“Hurrah, hurrah!” exclaimed the brute,
“How cleverly I play the flute!”

A fool, in spite of nature’s bent,
May shine for once, by accident.

The above at least partly expresses my views on today’s politicians.

And I wonder if I am the only one who sees a comparison between our current leader and one from Asimov’s Foundation novels.

Like this:

Attempt at Humor #1 — Morals

A teacher told her young class to ask their parents for a family story with a moral at the end of it, and to return the next day to tell their stories.

In the classroom the next day, Sam told his story first, “My dad is a farmer and we have chickens. One day we were taking lots of eggs to market in a basket on the front seat of the truck when we hit a big bump in the road; the basket fell off the seat and all the eggs broke. The moral of the story is not to put all your eggs in one basket.”

“Very good,” said the teacher.

Next, Mary said, “We are farmers too. We had twenty eggs waiting to hatch, but when they did we only got ten chicks. The moral of this story is not to count your chickens before they’re hatched.”

“Excellent!” said the teacher again, very pleased with the response so far.

Next it was Barney’s turn to tell his story: “My dad told me this story about my Aunt Karen … Aunt Karen was a flight engineer in the war and her plane got hit. She had to bail out over enemy territory and all she had was a bottle of whisky, a machine gun and a machete.”

“Go on,” said the teacher, intrigued.

“Aunt Karen drank the whisky on the way down to prepare herself; then she landed right in the middle of a hundred enemy soldiers.

“She killed seventy of them with the machine gun until she ran out of bullets. Then she killed twenty more with the machete until the blade broke. And then she killed the last ten with her bare hands.”

“Good heavens,” said the horrified teacher. “What did your father say was the moral of that frightening story?”

“Stay away from Aunt Karen when she’s drunk.”

Attempt at Humor #2 — Nutrition

A doctor was addressing a large audience in Oxford on the subject of modern nutrition.

“The rubbish we put into our stomachs should have killed most of us sitting here, years ago.

“Red meat is full of steroids and dye. Soft drinks corrode your stomach lining. Chinese food is loaded with MSG. High trans-fat diets can be disastrous, and none of us realize the long-term harm caused by the germs in our drinking water.

“But, there is one food that is the most dangerous of all and most of us have, or will eat it.

“Can anyone here tell me what food it is that causes the most grief and suffering for years after eating it?”

After several seconds of quiet, a 70-year-old man in the front row raised his hand, and softly said:

“Wedding Cake?”

Humor #3 — Poetry

Laugh and be merry, remember, better the world with a song,
Better the world with a blow in the teeth of a wrong.Laugh, for the time is brief, a thread the length of a span.Laugh and be proud to belong to the old proud pageant of man.

Laugh and be merry: remember, in olden time.
God made Heaven and Earth for joy He took in a rhyme,
Made them, and filled them full with the strong red wine of
His mirth
The splendid joy of the stars: the joy of the earth.

So we must laugh and drink from the deep blue cup of the sky,
Join the jubilant song of the great stars sweeping by,
Laugh, and battle, and work, and drink of the wine outpoured
In the dear green earth, the sign of the joy of the Lord.

Laugh and be merry together, like brothers akin,
Guesting awhile in the rooms of a beautiful inn,
Glad till the dancing stops, and the lilt of the music ends.
Laugh till the game is played; and be you merry, my friends.

Our two cats, Mist and Smoke spend a good deal of time in our sunroom. This room used to be our open-air patio — that is, it was outdoors and Mist and Smoke are indoor cats.

Now, however, they are allowed into the sunroom and can get some ten feet closer to the birds. We have lots of Mourning doves, hummingbirds, sparrows and similar birds and the occasional crow, Coopers hawk and squirrel.

In the morning they crowd the feeders and the ground under them. In the afternoon their shadows appear on the shade which my wife has lowered to prevent the sun from shining in her eyes.

Mist, the female and smaller of our cats, finds these shadows fascinating. She watches them from the floor, the chair, the TV table and Charlie’s “wheelie/walker.” For about two hours, until shortly before sunset, we can find Mist, and occasionally Smoke bird watching while Charlie reads or watches TV.

We enclosed our patio and built the sunroom so Charlie would have a room of her own to read, play games, watch TV, drink tea, smoke and enjoy her garden. It’s nice to have a room that her cats also enjoy and can spend time with her.

The Cat.

OB-SERVE the Cat up-on this page.
Phil-os-o-phers in ev-er-y age,
The ver-y wis-est of the wise,
Have tried her mind to an-a-lyze
In vain, for noth-ing can they learn.
She baf-fles them at ev-er-y turn
Like Mis-ter Ham-let in the play.
She leads their rea-son-ing a-stray;
She feigns an in-ter-est in string
Or yarn or any roll-ing thing.
Un-like the Dog, she does not care
With com-mon Man her thoughts to share.
She teach-es us that in life’s walk
‘T is bet-ter to let oth-ers talk,
And lis-ten while they say in-stead
The fool-ish things we might have said.

Mondays . . ,

well, it’s Monday.

Charlie’s new furniture arrived for our sunroom — it arrived about 8.30 am (with an arrival scheduled for between 8 and 10 am. Two chairs and a footrest. Pictures tomorrow.

Speaking of pictures, I’ve had a devil of a time uploading pictures to this blog. Tried several of the suggestions in the WordPress Support forums and nothing worked. So, I tried something else — I switched browsers.

It worked.

I generally use Firefox but I’ve been beating my head against the wall of an HTTP error trying to upload pictures since upgrading to WordPress 4 and its siblings. Sometimes it worked, often it didn’t — including today.

After trying everything else I could think of, I tried using Google Chrome. It worked. Yee-ha!

CAT TV

Cats

Well, now that I feel better, here’s a picture of Smoke and Mist, taken yesterday, as they were watching CAT TV. Just when I took the picture Mist turned around.

Hope your day went well and, if you’re a teacher, remember for this week: Tuesday is the new Monday.

Like this:

I can almost remember when most of the mail I received was something I wanted, aside from bills. It was not 90%+ JUNK. Today’s mail was 100% junk, and, with the exception of one item, I recycled them.

The one item that did not get recycled was a solicitation from a professional organization to which I once belonged to purchase accidental death and dismemberment insurance for $2.00/month. Right. Hmmmm . . .

The USPS (United States Postal Service) is losing money. Many, if not most, of us now use e-mail and pay bills by computer instead of mailing letters, invitations, thank you cards and checks. This cuts down on the volume of first class mail delivered by the Post Office.

I am able to filter out much, if not all, of the “spam” I receive in my e-mail accounts, but I cannot seem to do the same with my USPS mail–even when I attempt to opt out of things like credit card solicitations from banks and others. This appears to be about as effective as the Do Not Call Registry is for robo-calls and the like.

BRM–Business Reply Mail costs the same as regular US postage plus a fee for the company that owns the BRM permit. That company pays nothing if the reply envelope is not used but pays full cost+ if it is used, even if the envelope is empty. If I send two of these back per week, this generates more than fifty dollars/year in additional revenue for the USPS.

There are some 120,000,000+ households in the United States.

Let’s see $50.00 times 120,000,000 = $6,000,000,000 — I believe this would go far in reducing the seemingly perennial USPS monetary losses with no increase in cost to us. It might even get businesses to change how they operate–no more (or maybe just less) junk mail.

If you wish to push up the cost even more, put something in the envelope–NO, not sand (that’s probably illegal anyway). Put all, or part, of the advertisement in the BRM envelope–where it won’t clog your trash/recycle bin. It’ll up the weight of the envelope and raise its cost. You might even get creative–put a Guy-co ad in a Prfoessyve envelope or send in a half-dozen coupons from one of those super-duper coupon envelopes.

All those BRM post cards? Send those too and don’t bother to fill them in.

If we all do our part, maybe, just maybe, we can help return the Post Office to the profitability and admiration it enjoyed in 1947. 1947? Why 1947? Because that was when the movie Miracle on 34th Street came out. (If you still don’t understand, please, watch the movie–the original version: 1947.)